This post is taken directly from the Washington Post Opinion section.  It is so powerful that I don’t want to edit it in any way.

Saudi Women Can Drive. Just Let Them.

By Wajeha Al-Huwaider
Sunday, August 16, 2009 Washington Post Opinion Section
 
DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia Who is that woman who returns day after day to the border crossing, seeking to pass from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain, only to be turned away? She is me.
Who am I? A native of the city of Hufuf in eastern Saudi Arabia, where the world’s best dates are grown, a 47-year-old divorced mother of two teenage sons, and an employee of the vast Saudi oil company, Saudi Aramco.
 
I am not a dangerous person, so why do they turn me away? Because I refuse to present a document signed by my male “guardian,” giving his permission for me to travel. And why do I do that?
 
I possess such a document, but it is humiliating to have to produce it, and I am tired of being humiliated solely because I am a woman. So I have decided to try to leave my country without following the rules. I have urged other Saudi women to do likewise, and in recent weeks several have.
 
Everyone knows that women are denied rights in Saudi Arabia. And you may think that our fate is the same one that women in some other developing countries face, only a little worse. In truth, we endure a status that most Americans can scarcely imagine.
 
The guardianship rules are only part of a bigger system of subjugating women. Even with the permission of a guardian, a woman may not drive a car (except in some isolated rural areas and within the compounds that are home to many workers from Western countries). Obviously, there is nothing in the Koran that forbids driving. No, the reason we are not allowed to drive is that the power to transport ourselves would give men much less control over us.
 
So, one of my other campaigns has been for the right to drive. Last year on International Women’s Day I posted a video on YouTube of myself driving a car. It was filmed by another woman sitting in the passenger’s seat. I explained that many Saudi women who have lived abroad have driver’s licenses from other countries and would be happy to volunteer to teach our sisters how to drive. (That way they would not have to be alone in a car with a male driving instructor, lest terrible things happen.) This video has received more than 181,000 hits.
 
Earlier this year, while visiting my two sons at boarding school in Virginia (I send them there because I do not want them to grow up to be typical Saudi men), I staged a demonstration in front of a car dealership in Woodbridge. I addressed a message to U.S. automakers: Saudi women want to buy your cars (and many can afford to). But first, you must support our fight for the right to drive.
 
Women in Saudi Arabia may not go out without an abaya, an ugly black cloak that we have to wear on top of our regular clothes. You can imagine how great that feels in 100-degree heat. Saudi men, on the other hand, always wear white. In 2006, I dressed in pink when I staged a one-person protest march. It was the anniversary of the ascent of King Abdullah to the throne. By Saudi standards, Abdullah is a liberal, but he has not done nearly enough to change our situation. So I made a simple sign: “Give women their rights.”
 
I started in Bahrain. I had a taxi drive me to the border. After crossing to the Saudi side I pulled out my sign and marched along the causeway from the island nation to the Saudi mainland. After 20 minutes, a police car pulled up and officers arrested me. After a day of interrogation in the police station, the cops were prepared to release me. But of course they couldn’t release me into my own custody. I had to phone my younger brother to come act as my guardian.
 
Women are not allowed to participate in sports. How could you in an abaya? When I was very young, I was a tomboy. I loved to ride a bike, which my mother allowed, although most girls are forbidden because this activity might cost them their “virginity” by rupturing the hymen. When I was 7, my teacher tied my legs and beat me with a stick when she learned that I had been playing soccer with boys. Then she made me sit at my desk all day, without going to the bathroom or getting a drink of water.
 
While women are forced to be entirely dependent on men, men are allowed to follow their whims. A woman can get a divorce, but only by going through a laborious legal procedure in religious court. However, a man can divorce his wife merely by saying “I divorce you” three times. Although this is an ancient practice, these days the clerical authorities are debating whether the man has to say this in person, or if a text message will suffice. Already a judge in Jiddah has approved the first case of text-message divorce. The man was in Iraq to participate in jihad.
 
It’s also legal for men to marry girls as young as 7 and 8 years old. I have campaigned on behalf of an 8-year-old girl who was married off to a 50-year-old man. I posted a video on YouTube against child marriages, showing little girls and teenagers voicing their refusal to be child brides. The video was covered by local female writers, then picked up by CNN. This campaign terminated that marriage, and the little girl is free.
 
Several months ago, the Saudi minister of justice announced plans to ban child marriages, but nothing has happened. A few days ago a 70-year-old man married a 9-year-old girl in Jiddah. Her father technically sold his daughter for $4,000. The day after the wedding night, the little girl was missing. She was found by her brother in a candy shop where she used to go to buy sweets.
 
Then there’s polygamy. Saudi men are allowed to marry as many as four wives. Polygamy has destroyed many families. In my campaigns, I often feel that I am fighting for my mom.
After she married my father, she was informed by his mother that he already had another wife. When my mother confronted him, he assured her that she was his favorite and promised to divorce the first woman. For a time my mom was happy. But after a few years, she learned that my father had taken another wife. Now, my mom was no longer the favorite.
 
I was luckier than many. I married for love, and my former husband still holds a place in my heart, but we are no longer together. After the attacks on America in 2001, the Saudi government was embarrassed by the role of its citizens in this violence. To try to improve our country’s image, the government liberalized slightly. I had been posting comments about women’s rights on various Web sites, and I was invited to write a weekly column in al Watan, the nation’s largest newspaper. Then, the English-language Arab News also wanted my work.
 
My husband chafed at my high profile, and he complained about the demands on my time. One day he announced that he was marrying a second wife. Although he swore that I was the most important one, I had watched my mother waste her life. I demanded a divorce.
My time in the limelight lasted only a year before the Saudi censors banned me. The authorities never communicated this to me directly, but one by one the editors of each publication rejected my pieces.
 
There are many Saudi women whose lives are marred far more than mine. Fatima Al-Azaz, for example, was lucky enough to marry for love, but her half-brothers decided that her husband’s social standing was too low, so they persuaded a religious court to divorce them. The couple cannot ignore the divorce order because here people can be whipped, imprisoned and even executed for contact with someone of the opposite sex who is not their spouse or a relative. Still, Al-Azaz tried to return to her husband. To prevent that, she was first imprisoned for nine months together with her infant, then released to a women’s shelter where her movements are restricted.
 
Or consider the story of Jamila, a wife of a relative. The eldest of 18 children by four wives of a poor date-farmer, Jamila completed high school with outstanding grades. Soon after graduation, her father agreed to marry her to a man from the city.
 
Jamila traveled with her mother to the city, where she met her husband for the first time on their wedding night. He turned out to be mentally disturbed. She pleaded with her mother to take her back home. Then Jamila was pushed into a room with her new “guardian,” who consummated their union forcefully, while she screamed and pled for mercy.
 
One of my protest-video campaigns that did not succeed was a plan to post filmed testimony by women like Jamila. We were able to make one or two videos, but I found that even with their faces hidden, most Saudi women who have suffered are afraid to speak about it publicly.
 
There are women who don’t support our cause — rich ones whose husbands benefit from the system, and religious ones who just don’t believe in change.
 
Why am I different? I am not sure. Perhaps because as a Shiite (who make up 10 percent of the Saudi population) I have always been somewhat marginalized. Perhaps because my mother, unlike most others, allowed me to play soccer with the boys, and I’ve always felt equal to them. Perhaps because I have the security of working for Aramco, the giant government oil company which depends on its largely Western workforce and therefore functions as an enclave of relative liberalism. Perhaps because I went to college in America and got to experience a life in which women are treated as people, not property.
wajeha4@gmail.com
Wajeha Al-Huwaider, a writer and an activist, is a co-founder of the Society for Defending Women’s Rights in Saudi Arabia.

I went to an all-girls school. In Australia, such schools seem very common but in the UK single sex education is becoming increasingly rare. In my town there were three secondary schools – a boys’ school, a girls’ school and a mixed school. Back when my parents were at the boys’ and girls’ schools (yes, we really are a local family!) they were grammar schools which means they were selective, but state-funded. The mixed school was the tertiary school – for those who didn’t take or pass their 11 plus exam. It was supposed to teach more practical subjects.

While I was at school the single sex schools out-performed the mixed school. Then the boys’ school started to drop down the league tables. A short while after I left I believe the girls’ school started to struggle to maintain standards too. Nowadays all three schools are pretty much on a par in terms of academic achievements. They all do better in some things than others.

So, with my judgement based on this specific example I wonder whether there is a place for gender-segregated education?

League tables don’t seem to help justify single sex schooling (at least in the UK) because the remaining selective schools and many private schools are still single sex, while state-funded schools are more likely to be mixed. Selective and private schools are always going to outperform state schools due to better funding and the old argument that families who send their child to these schools are going to be more supportive of the education process. The sex issue becomes secondary.

My own experience says single sex education is a good thing. I didn’t give two hoots what I looked like at school (and there are unfortunately many photos to prove that!) because there were no boys there. I could annoy my teachers with lots of lesson participation without worrying that the latest object of my affection would think me dorky. We saw the boys in after school clubs, so we still learnt how to interact with the opposite sex, but in school hours where our priority was supposed to be learning we were relatively undistracted by our hormones (aside from much pencil-case scribbling!)

I plan to do a separate post on my thoughts on women-only professional environments (such as women’s networking events), because I am not a fan. But I am aware that the argument could be levelled at single sex education that it doesn’t prepare children for the real world, where you need to excel despite the presence of the opposite sex. Perhaps female only environments breed a belief among girls that women should be treated differently. Perhaps male only schools breed misogynists.

My own schooling taught me that my sex was irrelevant when considering achievement. The best and the worst in the class were both female and girls taking advanced science options were not outnumbered by boys.

Mixed sex environments are natural, and there is plenty of time for that. After our GCSEs (aged 16) the schools shared curriculums, offering more subjects to their combined pupils at the three different sites. At university there is plenty of time for inter-gender mingling. At work there can be no avoiding it.

Many education studies have proven that women and men’s brains do work quite differently (in simple terms we are often told boys excel in exams while girls outperform in coursework). If this is the case, surely segregated and tailored education has a place?

Very interested to hear your thoughts – particularly from anyone in the educational sphere.

Following my recent posts about images of topless women in the mainstream media, I was very interested to read this letter to the editor of The Guardian in the UK.

The original article discussed the question of breastfeeding, and whether mothers who either choose not to breastfeed or who cannot successfully breastfeed, are made to feel like bad mums. There were three letters in response and the top one made for interesting thinking.

The woman writing says:

“while on maternity leave I rang the restaurant where I was planning to join my colleagues for our Christmas lunch to check if there was anywhere I would be able to feed my baby. The rather bemused answer was that I could do it “in the toilet”. The equation of breastfeeding with excretion says it all.”

I have two sisters and three nieces (two of which were breastfed) and yet I confess to exhibiting the classic signs of discomfort when someone breastfeeds in my presence. My own preferred coping technique is the eye-lock – hold their eye and don’t let go. Why on earth do I feel this way? Why are near naked women wandering around trade shows acceptable (and the photo I linked to there is tame to what I have witnessed at some shows where women have nothing at all on their top half), when a mother performing one of the most natural functions in the world is seen as grotesque enough to be confined to the toilet?

Have our sensibilities of proper and improper gotten totally out of control? Have we become more sensitive to breast feeding in public in recent years or has our increasing tolerance of sexualised images of breasts distanced us from our understanding of their proper function?

And please – among all the theory, lets spare a thought for the mothers. No woman should have to sit in the loo while they feed their child. No woman should be made to feel ashamed of her role as mother and provider for her baby. And surely no baby should be forced to eat their meal in a public lavatory.

Former US president Jimmy Carter wrote an editorial a couple of weeks ago that rocked my world in a fabulous way.  I wanted to share it with you all.

I wonder whether some of the more regular readers here at AWW thought I had missed it.  I hadn’t, I was just trying to decide what to write about it that could appropriately introduce such a great sentiment. In the end I decided to keep it brief and let his article speak for itself.

Jimmy Carter has severed his ties with the Southern Baptist Convention due to its refusal to acknowledge equality of women.  He says that after six decades of involvement it was a difficult and painful decision;

“It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be “subservient” to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.”

Who knows what he, and the other Elders (including Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu and Aung San Suu Kyi) actually plan to do to pursue their opinions through into tangiable actions.  For now, I am just over the moon to see such highly regarded individuals focusing on global equality for women. 

You can read Jimmy Carter’s feminist editorial here.  Highly recommended reading.

I discovered an interesting website this morning, and it got my mind whirring. The website and its concept is Wingspouse:

“A wingspouse is similar to a wingman which is sometimes described as a pilot who supports another in a potentially dangerous flying environment.

“A wingspouse partners with her husband and has his back as he advances in his career. It is a non-traditional career with many rewards. A wingspouse reaps the benefits of acting with her husband as one united force… working together to balance career and family, and celebrating every victory together. Who said you can’t have it all!”

I am sure you can imagine how I felt about this – it made my skin crawl in its 1950s overtones. But I clicked through everything up there and had a good read – I wanted to give the author a fair chance to convince me that abandoning my own career to help my partner achieve all his life goals was more than a dated old fashioned concept of the role of women.

I was utterly intrigued when I clicked through onto the blog to read this:

“However, when we tried to define whether our role was more traditional or feminist, we stumbled. We both felt professionally empowered and incredibly successful, but we realized that giving up our own careers for the stay-at-home life normally falls under the traditional wife. If we had not married executives, we clearly would have been climbing the corporate ladder somewhere, but somehow we had both come to the realization that serving as our husband’s partners was the way to have it all. Perhaps our non-traditional feminist approach to being a traditional SAHM was yet another example of our chameleon quality.”

One minute I find myself thinking *You are living the life of a 1950s housewife!*, then I reply *but my sister is a very satisfied stay at home mum, who has walked away from her successful teaching career in making the choice to spend more time with her children*. And then I scoff; *What a waste of their apparently strong business brains* and *what did all those feminists fight for over the last 100 years so you can just stay home and ‘serve’ like before, but this time it’s your choice to*. And then I capitulate… because that I think is what it boils down to. Choice.

These women are happy. Their choices aren’t mine. The lifestyle choice actually makes my skin crawl. But I believe that feminism is about empowering and equipping women to have choice. And this is their choice.

No I don’t like it, but I should be defending their right to choose it. It’s hard though. Makes me feel nauseous.

Monday’s Canberra Times’ Times2 supplement featured a long profile of the director-general of the World Health Organisation (syndicated from The Guardian in the UK).

The article was a pleasure to read – fascinating to hear about Margaret Chan’s job, how she got where she did and the issues that the WHO is grappling with; swine flu the obvious current distraction, but also the effects of climate change on the world’s health.

Chan only started medical training to spend more time with her boyfriend – a little personal fact I loved considering the heights she has reached.

Do read the article, it’s just the kind of thing I was asking for when I said women need to continue to see successful (and human) women profiled in the mainstream media.

However I must say; given the topic and the subject of the piece it seemed utterly incongruous that the last paragraph should mention a conference she had recently presented at in Sharm-el-Sheikh (I am guessing it was at the recent Human Rights Council) to “address the spouses of world leaders on maternal death rates”. Seems a woman can run the WHO, but matters of such weight still need presenting to the wives of the men who really run things around here. Is it still necessary to rely on pillow talk from wives to get women’s issues on the political agenda??

I wanted to do this follow-up post from yesterday’s because I have been mulling over what I wrote, and a few feedback comments on twitter and I want to try to be a little clearer about what my issue is with topless women in the mainstream media. In arguing back against anyone’s comments here I have tried not to be aggressive in my language. Posts on this blog are only ever my opinions, and if you want to comment back then yours are equally valid. I really welcome comments, both agreeing and disagreeing with my opinions. I learn a lot from every comment on this blog – they make me question and think through my opinions, which often then alter.

1) It’s not pictures of topless women I don’t like… its where they are and the double standards. Society deems sexualised or erotic images of near-naked women to be OK over your morning coffee, while equivalent shots of men are consigned to the top shelf.

2) One comment I received on twitter was that “there’s a class aspect to that judgement that i find problematic”. Maybe the working class is more comfortable with these images. Or perhaps it is the upper classes. I am not sure which was meant, and I am certainly pretty middle class in my background and upbringing. But I am unsure why class matters at all in this. Are working class women less oppressed/repressed than their middle class counterparts if they find these images acceptable (if indeed they do), or does it merely indicate that their familiarity with the status quo stops them from noticing the inequality of the situation?

3) There was also a comment that “I know of lesbians who like those mags”. It is often easy for people to hold up lesbians as the natural owners of feminism – for after all, don’t they perfectly live the feminist ideal with all that man-hating? Well, no, in my opinion they are no more representative of feminists than straight women. For starters, a penchant for the feminist philosophy does not equal a dislike for men (and nor does, I might add, lesbianism). Secondly, Lesbians are simply sexually attracted to women rather than men. That makes them no more likely to identify, care about or fight for women’s equality. Sometimes they might live in a unique (and perhaps socially enlightened) community of friends and family which means they don’t experience inequality. Sometimes their sexual preferences and life choices give rise to more difficulties in their life than the average woman – highlighting inequalities more than normal. But I can’t see why any of that would mean that lesbian approval on an issue of female equality should undermine a straight woman’s objection to it. To me it is frankly a non-argument. Misogynists often classify feminists and lesbians in the same over-used pigeon hole. It gets boring.

4) The most interesting thought I was left chewing over, and one I may need to do another follow-up post about in time, was based on this comment that calendar girls and topless models are “probably more of a symptom than a cause” of repression of women. This comment seems to reach right to the heart of so many of the issues surrounding the women/equality debate. Does society tolerate naked pictures of women but not men in the mainstream *because* women have been oppressed for so long, or do these images continue to feed the stereotypes and social constructs which continue the inequalities? I would tend to believe it is both, which for me justifies a call to address the matter. Whether sexualised images should be in the mainstream media – accessible by children of all ages – is one for society to decide. I am calling for equality in those images, whichever way that falls (and my own vote would be for erotic poses to be top shelf only, regardless of the gender).

Pirelli today announced details of its 2010 calendar. And I must say I am decidedly unexcited.

I am obviously not the target market, and Pirelli needn’t be worried – it’s been around since the 60s and is still an icon of classiness worn with pride by any mechanic’s workplace. But whether it is Playboy, Pirelli, or the newer lads mag brands of Nuts and Zoo, boobs are boobs and erotic photography is what it is.

The legitimate industry provides cover for a great deal of sleazy and fake operators, and its love of young girls makes me rather uncomfortable. In the UK, the largest selling newspaper still features a topless page 3 girl every day and anyone objecting to these ‘soft’ images is often quickly labelled as prudish.

But I don’t like it. While there are fireman calendars, we don’t see men draped across the pages of the mainstream press. And (with a very few exceptions… none of which are sold on eye-level shelves) the body parts the men show (while excessively oiled up) are just the same parts we would see at the swimming pool. The images of women show a whole lot more.

To me, these magazines and calendars are demonstration of how ingrained and acceptable the objectification of women is in society. When sitting on a train next to someone openly reading one of these magazines (or simply reading The Sun newspaper), I feel uncomfortable. I can almost physically feel them disregarding my brain, my personality, my contribution as a human… because their brain is being focused on the female form and the stereotypical depiction of perfection.

I am not at all against women being sexy. Or regarded as beautiful. But it is important to me that these features are recognised as part of a greater whole. There is nothing in this industry that promotes independence, or intelligence, or humour… and I believe it teaches boys to assess women with entirely the wrong criteria.

What do you think?

Australia has been gripped by a TV show over the last few weeks; Masterchef. For those who, like me, grew up with Lloyd Grosseman’s Masterchef in the UK, scrap your ideas of what we might have been watching. Its been really enjoyable because while taking a modern Pop Idol type format, the judges and contestants have all been thoroughly pleasant and constructive throughout.

Why am I telling you all this? Last night was the final, and the two finalists were women.

What really struck me was that these two women – who have spent weeks cooking and learning and stressing about elimination together – were so supportive of each other it made me almost tearful. They both *really* wanted that title, and at the three head-to-head parts of the show, where points were being revealed, you could see they were finding it hard to interact with anyone due to nerves. However after two hours of cooking the first thing they did, before taking their dishes for judging, was check out each other’s dishes and give genuine compliments and a lovely hug.

Discussions around whether women act like women, and whether that is a bad thing (particularly in the workplace) fill many corners of the internet but last night Masterchef gave me a different perspective.

I am with Germaine Greer when she says women are not biologically disposed to be more caring and compliant than men – it is just that a woman raised by a woman to be that way finds it very hard to raise her own girls differently. She simply doesn’t notice she is doing it much of the time. But if we are going to be trained by life to be “female” in the way we interact, how nice to see millions tuning in to see women able to be caring AND winning. The world of professional cooking (particularly restaurant cooking) is dominated by men – something that has always seemed incongruous when food preparation is still the responsibility of the woman in many households. It was a pleasure to watch an all woman final.

Who is your hero?  Who do you look up to?  Is there anyone that makes you feel the way you did when you were 11 and you discovered someone who seemed slightly godlike in their achievements?

I was chatting to a friend back in London on MSN the other day when we got to talking about our old CEO.  She is lucky enough to still work for the woman in question, and we both shyly confessed to having major hero worship feelings towards the boss.

It got me to thinking of this perennial question of whether a lack of role models is directly linked to underachievement among disadvantaged societal groups.  You hear it all the time; does America have enough successful black men to show black youth opportunities beyond the overly evident gang culture? (I am sure Obama is helping somewhat with that one!)  Do young girls in schools see enough successful women?  Well, I think there are some excellent role models out there for women, plenty in fact, my issue is that the media rarely gives them the exposure they are due – instead choosing to run yet another article about former topless models and their popstar husbands.  So I wanted to share with you four of my heroes, in no particular order.

1)      The CEO of my last company.  Awesome woman.  Started the agency with a partner and in nine years it was operational in 5 countries, employing well over 100 people and had spun out three separate ventures.  A no bullsh*t woman who is highly professional.  You know where you stand – the business is all important but if you bring something to that business she will bend over backwards to give you what you need to continue to make that contribution.  One of the most savvy business people I have ever come across.

2)      My grandmother (MBE).  An accountant and the patron of a whole heap of local charities.  She also raised two children and was the epitome of the phrase ‘pillar of the community’.  She was chairman of the governors at my school.  All in all, a remarkable woman to grow up with, and one who taught me that I can do whatever I want with my life (and she never even had to put that in words – she said it by example).

3)      Richard Branson.  Quite simply THE most successful business person in my personal league table.  I love his passion for what he does, and the way he is not ashamed to let his heart guide the decisions his head has to make.  He wants to own a company in an industry he is interested in… then he works out how to make it happen.  He approaches business with good humour, but I have no doubts that his brain is as sharp as a brand new block of knives.  I even like those ugly jumpers he wears because they demonstrate that he does business *his* way.

Two out of three are women.  Not bad at all!  What about you?  Are your heroes the same gender as you? Are your commonalities driven by sex, age, nationality, industry, a disadvantage or handicap you share, family… or something else?